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republicanism

I think the country just started to get a lot less Republican tonight

by Tim Russo on March 2, 2010 · Comments

Thank you Jim Bunning.

Thank you for being the Senator who every Senator knows is two bricks shy of a load, off your rocker to the point that your majority leader forced you out of the Senate this term.  Thank you for getting your colleague’s support, to the point that Jon Kyl claims unemployed benefits make people lazy, to the point of standing behind your filibuster for days, despite knowing how bat shit cray you are, all to prove their ideology on the backs of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Those hundreds of thousands of Americans will now spend weeks fighting paperwork to get unemployment benefits that you, Jim Bunning, halted, unpaid Medicaid claims that you, Jim Bunning, convinced your Republican colleagues to support, every one of whom possess full knowledge of your bat shitness.  Because your Republican Senate colleagues were so desperate to win an election, those hundreds of thousands will fight bills that go overdue, check bouncing fees, car payments, defaulting on their mortage, running out of medication, FOR MONTHS.

In an election year.

All because your Republican Senate colleagues, Jim Bunning, who are 100% convinced that YOU are the crazy one, wanted to serve their ideology to win that election.

Thank you for helping.

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Tom Blumer on a free market jihad in defense of Toyota’s unfettered right to kill drivers

by Tim Russo on February 24, 2010 · Comments

Somtimes the slavish devotion to ideology of the mouth breathing core of Republicanism can reach sublime levels of perfection.  In this world, you will find Tom Blumer.

In Blumer’s fevered twitching soulless mind, where somehow Toyota is related to ACORN (?!?!?!), it makes perfect sense to defend Toyota, whose cars have killed drivers all over the country, and whose response to their cars killing people was to stonewall, obfuscate, and refuse to recall their product until a reporter, Brian Ross of ABC News, started making noise.

In the real world, this is how journalism and government is supposed to work – often, the only ally the truth has against a system ignoring truth is a journalist with some guts, shoe leather, and a megaphone, who by use of that megaphone gets government to move.  It is to be celebrated.

Unfortunately, this does not blend well with the free market absolutists who have dominated Republicanism for decades.  Those dead drivers are simply fuel on the altar of Tom Blumer’s religion of the free market, where every single thing the free market does is an unmitigated good, and anything the free market is forced to do against its will is a blatant evil.

This argument between no government and some government has been settled for centuries, but occasionally gets argued, over and over, by ignorant pigs like Tom Blumer.  Thanks to the internet, we get to see the machinations of their empty souls in near real time.

Blumer’s actually providing a public service.  Tom Blumer is reminding the world just how dangerous Republicans are when given any power, because what Tom Blumer argues in a dusty corner of the internet’s seething maggot pit of wingnuttia is precisely how Republicans have governed, and would govern again, whenever given the chance.  They would throw human lives onto a funeral pyre in service to their ideology, as Tom Blumer has been doing now for weeks.

Thanks, Tom, for the reminder.

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PD’s Naymik documents the teabagger sellout on Sunday front page

by Tim Russo on February 21, 2010 · Comments

Republicans are as predictable as the movement of the solar system.  At the moment, this is manifesting itself in their continued pursuit of the margins of political thought in pursuit of power.  After a moment of reflection in 2009, in 2010 they are all in.

For perhaps two decades now, the GOP has been captive to a hard right core of activists whom official Republicanism uses like whores to win marginal elections, then ignores utterly.  In that period, that core has been the God, guns, and gays neanderthal knuckle dragging rejectionist wing of anti-abortion sexual obsessives.  And yet, abortion remains legal, reasonable gun control remains firmly in the mainstream, the inevitable pursuit of gay rights continues its march forward, and immigration continues to change the county for the better.  Oh darn.

After the election of Barack Obama, that core of Republicanism has gone well beyond beating their Bibles, headlong into racism, hate, violent rhetoric, and violence itself.  They are now the teabaggers, a paranoid strain of mutant political thought based on the embrace of pure fiction as philosophy.  They no longer base their world view on a set of assumptions that are arguable, such as when does life begin, or how much gun control is good or bad, or whether or not gay rights are civil rights.  Teabaggers base their world view on a set of assumptions that are literally false, provably false, whose sum total amounts to fiction.

For example, teabaggers cite the constitution endlessly, like the Bible itself, but not constitutional law, a 230 year accumulation of legislation, amendments, and jurisprudence a bit too long to actually read.  They complain about how many thousands of pages are in a health care reform bill, how can you expect them to read one volume of case law?  No sir.  Just the words on the parchment signed in 1789 as if they are on Moses’ tablets, even though they have evolved over more than two centuries to fit our country’s own evolution, dressing themselves in colonial garb and shouting the preamble as if this makes them an authority to declare an inviolate truth only they know.

These parasitic whores, who have been contracted out by Republicanism, are just as predictable as their johns.  They are now even more angry.  Like every self-respecting prostitute, no amount of abuse will prevent the teabaggers from getting on their knees again, opening wide, and teabagging their master further to full climax.  The GOP, despite knowing full well how this wretched addiction of theirs has marginalized their party, can’t pull away.  It feels too good.

Thus, Mark Naymik today details the teabaggers’ symbiotic fellating of the GOP, which has now reached the point of teabaggers attempting to take official control of their host.  The maggots now want to become the carcass on which they feed.

The outcome is just as predictable.  Further into the margins Republicanism drifts.  For a brief moment last year, official Republicanism wondered whether or not going in for one more fellating was a good idea.  What we have seen in the past two weeks, at CPAC, the Tea Party convention, and now in the media, is the total abandonment of that brief moment of sanity.  Once more into the bedroom, they march, to the point of wildly cheering none other than Dick Cheny, yes, Dick Cheney, shouting “run, Dick run”.  They’re all in.

It may take a while to play out at the ballot box, but this way lies catastrophe for the Republican Party.  And it brings such a smile to my face.

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Hey teabaggers – your 2 weird fetishes do not amount to political thought

by Tim Russo on November 27, 2009 · Comments

It’s irrational to find the underside of a toe nail sexually arousing, and yet, for those so aroused, it’s addictive.  It’s called a fetish.

If you understand that your fetish is just that, great.  Go suck the underside of a toe nail, see if I care.  If you think your fetishes are somehow rational, you are misguided.  If you think your fetishes amount to a political philosophy, you’re a god damned idiot….and a conservative Republican teabagger.

Let’s start with historical re-enactment, the first, most obvious fetish of conservative Republicanism.  We’ve all seen the magazines, maybe in the library or at the barber shop – Civil War Times, Military History, or whatever….the sepia-toned, luxuriously illustrated scenes of great daring do, with ads for gold pawn shops, toy soldiers, and “rare” “coins” sprinkled throughout…you could sell these morons a ticket to the moon if you wrapped it in red white and blue.

The teabaggers masturbate to this.  They do.  They dress up in period garb, wave a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag at a tea party, then go home and roll around in fake parchment reproductions of the Declaration of Independence, cleaning up their ejaculate with genuine imitation copies of the Federalist Papers.  Then they come back and do it again, this time making sure their “authentic” costume is more authentic-y, because a fellow “patriot” one-upped theirs last time by carrying antique hard tack from an encampment at Antietam which he purchased online for only $4.99.

In the early days of the country, Americans sought example for such daring-do in European history.  Napoleon!  This was eventually rejected by the culture, as America developed its own history.  But it stems from the same fantasy instinct – someone, somewhere, at some other time, had a much more AWESOME go of it, and they looked AWESOME while they did it, so let’s play!

The second fetish of conservative Republicanism is, of course, sex.  It stems from the evangelical Christian approach to sex – prohibitive, judgmental, and negative, which creates in the conservative Republican a huge amount of guilt over any sex they may want or get, however hot or un-hot.  A huge percentage of them are closeted gays, the rest feel guilty if they even get a damn hard on, so they obsess over it, repressed to the point of bursting.

Add Sarah Palin (who, frankly, ain’t all that hot) and you now have the full flower of the fetish, green light that shit, baby.  Conservative Republican men jack off to pictures of Palin, their wives love Palin because she appears to be what their husbands crave, and the cycle begins.  The closeted gays get further repressed from being surrounded by overtly hetero fawning over some stupid pin-up, and the entire thing turns into a volcano of ejaculate erupting like a fire hose out of Mt. Vesuvius.

Upon this pile of psycho-sexual obsessive compulsive near-schizophrenic twitching, conservative Republicanism plants buzzwords.  FREEDOM!  LIBERTY!  CONSTITUTION!  The teabaggers repeat the words over and over like an incantation, all while running around with their dicks and dildos, spraying spoo all over each other, pretending they are part of a great historic political movement, filming documentaries of themselves.

THIS IS NOT POLITICAL THOUGHT.

YOU PEOPLE HAVE A PROBLEM.

The combination of these two fetishes into some “movement” will be studied by entire departments of psychology at the university level for decades to come, but it is not political.  It is just fucking weird.

The good news is that this bizarre festival of period garb and sex belongs to the Republican Party.  All your base are belong to you, Republicans.  May they long continue their fetishism.

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Time to play the blame game again. And again. And again.

by Tim Russo on November 24, 2009 · Comments

I’m a former campaign hack, so despite my aspiration to think long term, I’m always thinking about the next election.  Pinning the blame on George W. Bush and through him Republicans for the economic nightmare we currently are fighting, and pinning that blame on Republican ideology once and for all, happens to merge those two approaches.  Democrats need to get better at it; fast for 2010, permanently for our country.

Short term, of course, this matters for the 2010 mid terms.  We ain’t turning a corner anytime soon, and voters will still be looking to lay blame.  Ted Strickland needs Republicans to hold this bag, so does our US Senate nominee (who will be Jennifer Brunner), and so do our congressional candidates nationally.  But long term, America as a country needs Republicans to hold the bag for this economic collapse, because until they do, we as a country are going to repeat this catastrophe, over and over.

Our own Brian has found for me my new favorite chart, proving one, only one, essential point in this case.  The red lines are Republican presidencies, the blue lines Democrat.

Anybody who has been paying attention should not be surprised by this, but Reagan conservatism has consistently resulted in an increase in debt relative to GDP, while Democrats have consistently reduced debt relative to GDP.

Change in Debt-to-GDP Ratio

Change in Debt-to-GDP Ratio

It is total farce, in the face of such plainly obvious facts, that Republicans are still permitted by media of all stripes to claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility.  Republicans deserve nothing but scorn on this point, but instead, their caterwauling goes unabated.  That deference allows Republicans to not only bang away at Barack Obama’s efforts to clean up the Republican mess, but it gives them a seat at the table in the debate, a seat they should be ashamed to even occupy if they had one ounce of self-awareness.

The short term political problem of the economy is one of narrative and campaign messaging ahead of 2010.  I suspect the White House has decided to make deficit reduction a theme of the State of The Union speech in order to pound home the Republican record on deficits for the full year leading up to the election.  If there’s one thing Republicans can’t defend, it’s their record on spending.

But long term – and I mean REAL long term, the kind of long term you see in that chart – America needs to decide politically, once and for all, that Reagan Republican economic ideology is and was a lie, a con-job, a poison.  Reagan Republican ideology did not work, except for the very rich.  Reagan Republican ideology did not yield stability, it yielded volatility.  Reagan Republican ideology did not reduce debt, it exploded debt, in its every manifestation, bar none.  Repeatedly.

And Reagan Republican ideology has led to a long term recession right now, so deep it was almost a depression, which will last so long it will start to feel like a depression anyway.   It isn’t political gamesmanship to place the blame for this on Republicans.  It is survival.  Because Reagan Republicanism is HOW WE GOT HERE.  Either America figures out that the Republican sales pitch is horseshit entirely, or America dooms itself to another round.

Another round of fighting to reduce Republican created debt, while enormous priorities go unfunded, while Republicans throw insults from the sidelines claiming they were right all along.  Another round of getting duped by Republicans who then claim credit for the resulting surplus, get into power again, and squander that surplus again, starting the whole cycle over until the next catastrophe.

Reagan economic Republicanism was a total failure.  Placing that blame is not some game.  It is an urgent, persistent, and long term necessity.  Democrats can’t be shying away from it.  Perhaps now that Democrats’ elected positions are at stake in 2010, they’ll start making that case.  It’s long overdue.

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The twitching rage of the irrational Republican when you tell them they fucked up our country

by Tim Russo on November 21, 2009 · Comments

Update: You ask. We answer. For those wondering if Republicans are fucked up, thanks for searching and stopping by. Your answer is below.

Hanging around the Palin idiots as much as Eric and I did yesterday really gets you down.  It’s hard to believe there are this many people in America this ignorant, and so proud to be so.  Exhibit A is their utterly predictable reaction when someone tells them, straight up, “You voted for George W. Bush twice, you fucked up our country, you can’t have it back.”

There are no two single acts in the average American’s engagement in politics more responsible for the current state of our country than the act of voting for George W. Bush, twice.  Try naming two bigger things the average American could have done to create the mess that Barack Obama has to clean up.  Try it.  You can’t.

Here’s how that conversation went whenever we began it yesterday with the Palin morons.  After the initial shock that someone might actually call Republicans on this, the litany begins.   All totally predictable, the same every single time, WITHOUT VARIATION, delivered with increasing agitation to the point of twitching rage.

First Utterly Predictable Spew of Horseshit – DID YOU EVER SERVE IN VIETNAM?

Hey, stupid.  I was in elementary school when we pulled out of Vietnam, you dumbfuck.  In fact, half the electorate doesn’teven remember Vietnam, which is a major reason Barack Obama got elected.  So shove it up your ass, go wipe your tears with your American flag, can’t you even count?

Second Utterly Predictable Spew of Horseshit – IT’S THE DEMOCRATS’ FAULT!

George W. Bush took a $6 trillion surplus and turned it into debt as far as the eye can see with a Republican Congress.  Then, George W. Bush gave us two unfunded wars, one of his choosing, the other of necessity, both of which he fucked up so bad not even Barack Obama may be able to fix the necessary one.  Then, he drove the entire economic system to total collapse, like Herbert Hoover on crack, right before he handed it off.  You voted twice for that, you stupid mother fucking dumbass fucktard.  Twice.

Third Utterly Predictable Spew of Horseshit – BILL CLINTON GOT HIS DICK SUCKED!

As always, it inevitably turns to a discussion of genitalia, because Republicans are the most sex-obsessed dipshits in all of political discourse.  This is also about the time the twitching begins, largely because of the mention of Bill Clinton’s name.

Fourth Utterly Predictable Spew of Horseshit – LOOK IN THE MIRROR, YOU FUCKED UP THE COUNTRY, NOT ME!

This is what a child sounds like when you catch them spraying their own urine all over the kitchen floor because it’s funny.  Like children, Republicans who voted for George W. Bush, TWICE, still think it’s funny that they did this. Ha fucking ha.

It’s not funny.  You fucked up our country, you god damned fucking idiots.  And you cannot have it back.  And until you accept responsibility for your actions, you won’t get it back.   So pick up a mop, start cleaning up the mess you created, or eat me.

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Republican lemmings following Sarah Palin over a cliff

by Tim Russo on November 19, 2009 · Comments

The PalinPalooza continues, indeed accelerates.  For a woman who incessantly mocked the “celebrity” of Barack Obama, Sarah Palin is making Barack look like an amateur.  The Republican Party, and all their organs of manipulation, play right along.

They’re all in.  Good.  Because nothing is more certain in today’s media environment than the cycle of build up, destroy.  The higher they rise, the harder they fall. The very same people today blowing smoke up Palin’s spandex clad sphincter will tomorrow shove a red hot poker up it.  That’s bankable.

But with Palin, the inevitable crash will be far worse than it would be if there was a single ounce of substance to her.  There isn’t.  No there there.  She’s not sitting atop a house of cards; that would at least be built of something.  Palin’s floating on a cloud of celebrity bling, period.  That cloud will eventually evaporate into dust.  And with her, the Republican Party.

It’s really unprecedented.  Every time I think Republicans might come to their senses, they double down.  Someday, probably decades from now, historians will look back on this era of American political history and unanimously declare that when Barack Obama became president, the Republican Party had simply gone mad.

The truly unbelievable reality is that right now, as that history is being made, not one Republican is aware of it.  Not a single one.  No one can say they weren’t warned.

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Dear Republicans; please continue your obsession with bows, et al

by Tim Russo on November 17, 2009 · Comments

Mrs. Bitch, I believe I love you.

Amazing. Dickless Cheney is giving advice on proper Presidential etiquette. On the world stage, Cheney is the equivalent of Muammar Gaddafi when it comes to diplomacy. Oh yeah, he’s the first person I’d run to for pointers if I wanted to really make a good impression on a dignitary from another country. Uh-huh.

Shut the fuck up, Dick. You’re last year’s news, beyond the mind-boggling, unprecedented mess you and The Supreme Idiot left behind….Seriously, if you people don’t have anything better than this tripe you’re glomming on to to take umbrage with, take a vacation. You really are sounding more and more demented every week.

The speed with which every single turd of dementia the right wing craps out their ass makes it to the top of, oh, say, Politico, is really beginning to make mainstream media look almost psychotic.  If I thought this nervous tick repetition of wingnuttia might hurt Democrats, I’d be concerned.  I tend to agree with Modern’s take on PalinPalooza, it does get tiresome.

However, I actually am thankful that it will no doubt continue.  Like the whoring out of their base, the Republican Party has become so good at this, they can’t stop it.  And the media has become so used to rote memorization of it, neither can they.  The difference between now and 1994 is the internet, which gleefully takes the lunacy, repeats it for pure comic purposes, which then gets repackaged by Jon Stewart or SNL or David Letterman, and that’s the impression that ends up sticking.  I don’t know when Republicans will realize this ain’t working for them anymore, but I hope it isn’t soon.

It’s a cycle that paints for the American electorate the undeniable spectacle of Republicanism as such a petty, whiny, cesspit of petulant stupidity that by the time an election comes around, independent voters will just dismiss them as a comedy routine.

Do carry on!

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Pho skips past the plainly obvious in the Carville Begala GOP report

by Tim Russo on November 11, 2009 · Comments

Pho has been blogging on and off lately, which is good.  I’d like to see more voices out of Akron.  Pho comes late to the Carville-Begala Tea Party party.

The first finding they emphasize is that the participants persuaded them that race is not the basis for their nearly universal loathing of Obama. You can question this study based on the bias of the investigators, but this is a hard conclusion to dispute. After all, the easy and advantageous (for Dems) conclusion would be that anti-Obama conservatives are just a bunch of unreconstructed bigots. That they find the opposite certainly is a credible finding and gives extra credence to the project generally.

That’s great argument right there – the conclusion gives credibility to the conclusion!  As far as the participants “persuading” Carville and Begala they aren’t bigots when it comes to Obama, bigots have become quite practiced at this persuasion.  Like Carville and Begala, Pho simply fails to ask the obvious follow up, and merely concludes they’re all bonkers.

As I said in my previous post, it’s a manifestly bad thing that some twenty percent of the electorate is bonkers.

The obvious question is why.  What could possibly make this huge chunk of the electorate, and the entire base of the Republican Party, believe to their core a canon of falsehoods and paranoia this bizarre?  Did they just go bonkers on November 4, 2008?  Or were they bonkers before?  Why is it Obama who suddenly makes them go bonkers?

The only credible answer to this question is racism.   Yes, an economic collapse does tend to create a similar level of unease in the electorate.  Yes, this paranoia has been stoked for decades by the leadership of the Republican Party.  Yes, the Republican Party’s base is far less educated than the average American.

However.

Every crackpot theory over the centuries used to justify racism – from eugenics, to the fear of slave uprising, to the myth of black men feeding on white girls – it isn’t just eerily similar to this crackpot canon of the Republican base, it’s precisely the same thing.  It’s even been given unvarnished voice, with talk radio, Glenn Beck, and the entire right wing media tossing aside any pretense, and just going straight for incitement.  I can understand why Carville and Begala would want to avoid entering this fray, and took the “I’m not racist I know black people” defense from their focus group, and got the hell outta there.  I don’t understand why a blogger like Pho would dismiss it.  Pho is right about his own conclusion.

Additionally, I think its incumbent on us non-crazy, reality-based folk to continually point this out.

Couldn’t agree more.  But you can’t “continually point this out” unless what you’re pointing out is truth.  And the truth is that this level of bonkers, at its fundamental core, is jet-fueled by racism.   Twenty percent of the electorate may, in fact, be bonkers, yes.  Unless we’re going to medically diagnose them as such, the only conceivable cause is that they’re also bigots.

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